For forty years, as a company man and as an independent agent, Charles Larpenteur would ply the fur trade on the upper Missouri River. Based on Larpenteur's daily journals, this memoir describes the business side and social milieu of the fur trade conducted from wintering houses and subposts in the Indian country.
The son of French immigrants who settled in Maryland, Charles Larpenteur was so eager to see the real American West that he talked himself into a job with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in 1833.